Posts Tagged ‘Firstpost’

Back in the early 1990s, the Ambanis sought to take on the then market-leader The Economic Times with a newspaper which promised more than business.

It was titled at different times as the the Business & Political Observer (under Prem Shankar Jha‘s editorship) and as the Observer of Business and Politics (under Pritish Nandy). But neither formulation, OBP or BPO, set the newsstands on fire and the paper from India’s biggest business house folded soon.

Now, the Economic Times, which has boasted of strong political coverage from its revamp days under T.N. Ninan in the mid 1980s, has inserted “political” into its masthead ahead of a hectic election season.

In State after State, in story after story, media houses, owners and professionals are turning out to be players in the very stories they are supposed to be purveying, making nonsense of issues such as integrity, conflict of interest, and crossmedia ownership.

“The story that broke the skullduggery in Goa first appeared on Firstpost. Later, it was methodically pursued by reporters from Hindustan Times’ Mumbai bureau.

“But what many people don’t know is that the Firstpost story was first commissioned when the reporter concerned was working for another magazine*, which takes pride in being politically neutral.

“The story remained in limbo for two weeks. It saw the light of day only when the reporter left the organisation, took the story with him, made one more trip to Goa and uncovered some more irregularities.

“Environmentalists in Goa were, however, not puzzled by the said magazine’s reluctance to go after the Goa government and its home-grown mining barons, given that it had sent a reporter earlier and had blocked that story then too.

“The magazine’s proprietor had bought an old house in a Goan village. Even as I write this, he is bending rules to get the house refurbished into a new age spa. Just across the house was an old jackfruit tree, which was cut even when the inside of its thick turmeric-coloured centre was still gleaming with moisture.